I just said what I said and it was wrong
Or was taken wrong

I know I’ve said some of this before, but if bloggers didn’t repeat themselves where would their content come from?

I like Daylight Saving Time, and the advantages it brings more than make up for the slight disruption in my schedule. In fact, the most annoying thing to me about the DST changeovers is hearing people complain about them. The “lost hour of sleep” is especially rich. Who are these hothouse flowers who always get exactly the same amount of sleep except for that terrible day in March? To hear them talk, you’d think they never stay up late watching a movie or reading a book. Only prisoners have such regimented lives.

I am sympathetic to parents with small children, because their changing sleep patterns can mess up your day. That problem, though, is worse when we change back to Standard Time in the fall. On what my wife calls The Day That Never Ends, the kids get up according to their internal clock but insist on going to bed according to the clock on the wall. Still, that lasts only a day or two. (Special note to Jason Kottke: If your kids take two weeks to adjust to the change, you’re doing something wrong.)

So what’s good about DST? Go to this page run by the US Naval Observatory, enter where you live, and look at an entire year’s worth of sunrise and sunset time given in Standard Time. Here’s what I get for Chicago:

Sorry about the need to scroll horizontally; that’s just how the results are formatted.

If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier.

This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight. Good for a nation of farmers, I suppose, but of no value to anyone in our current urban/suburban society except those people who get up and go running before work. And I see no reason to encourage them.

DST haters often point out “studies that prove” that the DST changeover costs us billions of dollars in lost productivity. There are three problems with these studies:

Second, do these “studies” ever look into the productivity of people who can’t get a good night’s sleep from May through July because the sun streams into their bedroom at an ungodly hour and the birds start singing outside their window at three-fucking-thirty in the morning? No, they do not.

And finally, even if it did cause a net loss of productivity, so what? Everything of value in life causes lost productivity: eating, drinking, talking with your friends, playing with your children, looking at the stars, everything.

If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter.1 It was the same on the East Coast. Nobody liked that.

People complain about the complications DST causes in scheduling, especially in our connected world where international phone calls have to be arranged between people in countries whose time changes occur at different points in the calendar. This is a real problem, but only because our vaunted technology has let us down.

The set of rules for calendars, time zones, and clock changes is exactly the sort of thing computers should be good at handling for us, but because of programmer arrogance and incompetence, we end up with problems that shouldn’t exist. In the past few years we’ve had Zunes that wouldn’t boot, Playstations that wouldn’t play, and iPhone alarms that wouldn’t alarm (again and again and again).

Because the rules are already in place, programmers only have to learn what they are and implement them. This is where the incompetence and arrogance come in. Programmers don’t bother to learn the rules and think they can be tossed off in a few lines of code. We end up with devices that promise to keep us on track but are less reliable than a paper calendar and a windup alarm clock.

So instead of signing a stupid petition, agitate for better programmers. And then go have a nice walk after dinner tomorrow; it’ll still be light out.

And if you’re wondering why I’m not accounting for predawn light in this case, it’s because winter skies tend to be more overcast and don’t provide as much twilight as summer skies do. ↩